Tsuyako Kitashima

Tsuyako "Sox" Kitashima (1918 – December 29, 2006) was a Japanese-American activist noted for her role in seeking reparations for Japanese American internment by the United States government during World War II, particularly as investigated by the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians in the 1980s.
Kitashima was born in 1918 in Hayward, California to parents who had emigrated from Yamaguchi Prefecture, Japan and owned a strawberry farm. She had five siblings. At school, her classmates were unable to pronounce her name, calling her "Socko" instead; this in time was further shortened to "Sox". Following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, Kitashima and her family were among those 120,000 Japanese Americans interned into relocation camps. They were kept in horse stalls at Tanforan, California, and later moved to a single room at Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah. In August 1945, Kitashima married.
She later became a spokesperson for the National Coalition for Redress and Reparations, and fought for the Civil Liberties Act of 1988, by which the American government formally apologized and granted reparations to the wartime internees.